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Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Move It Along

I stayed in town over Thanksgiving weekend. The place, while not deserted, seemed underpopulated. Which was nice, since Los Angeles underpopulated is like most other places slightly overpopulated.

The best thing was the traffic. It went from unbearable to merely annoying. You could actually move on the freeways, rather than feel like you were sitting in traffic most of the way.

The amazing thing is LA is trying to make it more miserable to drive. The idea is to force more citizens to take mass transit, or go on foot or bicycle. This is insane. I don't ask much of politicians--just don't be actively involved in the pursuit of misery.

If it's even rumored a politician wants more traffic jams, that should be a career-ender. But when you've got a one-party town, it's hard to stop what would anywhere else be extremism.

6 Comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh, you're missing the big story. In Columbus, which I suppose is represetative, the city has taken several notably useful secondary arteries/high volume secondary roads and removed traffic lanes to put in bicycle lanes. Often this reduces two lanes in one direction to a single lane.

My favorite configuration is where they put the bike trail along the curb, created parking outside the bike lane, and reduced the other lanes accordingly. This means no one can see what the other vehicles are doing--bikes can't see cars and cars can't see bikes.

Some positive number of people will be killed by this idiocy. And dollars to Buckeye Donuts there's federal money involved. I haven't heard what Lois Lerner is doing lately . . .

Of course letting things go as they are will likely be making things more miserable as well. This problem will not be solved until the car-driving generation ages and dies off. The farking millenials seem much happier with other modes of travel

It's true letting things as they are won't work. The obvious and only solution is to build more roads, like they used to do. Somehow, this is beyond the current generation of politicians, so the most any citizen can pray for is to not have them actively trying to make things worse.

Denver is trying more Bike lanes, and rental bikes available every few blocks. So far the rental bikes are very underused, especially when we have wintry weather. They are also trying to get us to car pool, but that can't work because 2 or 3 days a week many of us need to go somewhere other than home after or before work (meetings and the like).

The real answer will come when tele-commuting becomes more acceptable. The last five years I've worked for the state government, and I could have worked from home at various times, avoiding the rush hours. But State employee policies generally prohibit this, for fear that the employees will not be held accountable. Maybe they are right, so the solution may be new ways to hold employees accountable for working a whole day, even from home. There must be an app for that!